


anywhere we go can't be worse than this

by KilltheDJ



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album)
Genre: I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Late Night Conversations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:54:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23871949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KilltheDJ/pseuds/KilltheDJ
Summary: Kobra and Poison got into another fight, and just like usual, Jet's the one wading through the Kobra-side of the aftermath.But they're both tired of the same old lecture, and maybe it's time to askwhythey keep having the same old conversation.
Relationships: Jet Star & Kobra Kid (Danger Days)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 41





	anywhere we go can't be worse than this

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crabmoss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crabmoss/gifts).



> mikey my dear! this is for u <3

“Kobra? Can we talk?”

Kobra knew it wasn’t optional. Kobra already knew Jet had sent Ghoul off to talk to Poison, to ask what the  _ fuck  _ was going on, blah blah blah. It didn’t matter.

Jet was going to talk to him whether he liked it or not. “Y’know, Kobes, I  _ really  _ don’t wanna use the handcuffs, but -”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kobra sighed, staring up at his ceiling one last time before standing up, wincing as he put too much pressure on his knuckles. They stung, swollen, with Poison’s blood coating them. Great! Poison deserved it. “I know. Let’s go to the roof, yeah?” 

“You can’t stargaze our conversation away.” But Jet knew, presumably, that Kobra wanted to go to the roof because it was away from his brother and that was something he needed more often than he liked to admit. 

_ Venom Brothers.  _ Yeah, right. Did spitting venom at  _ each other _ count?

The stairs to the roof are more like precarious boxes, tubes, and containers stacked on top of each other next to the wall that faced away from the sunrise, and Kobra had to climb up the last portion rather than walk, but it was fine. There was a nest of blankets that only moved when it rained - 

Kobra’s little alcove, hidden away from everyone. Even in a crew full of nosey fuckers, they knew to leave his alcove alone, unless he accidentally took one of Jet’s pillows.

Speaking of Jet, he was still behind Kobra, like Kobra knew he would be, hesitantly sitting cross-legged on the blankets, looking at Kobra rather than the stars.

Kobra would make up constellations since he didn’t know any but liked to make shapes, but he did that with Poison, and they hadn’t done that since he was fifteen and had a bad case of Mars Fever. “So? You gonna say somethin’?”

“Waitin’ for you to say somethin’ about the stars,” Jet murmured, too soft to not be walking on eggshells. Kobra’s long past saying anything about the stars, though; to Jet, at least. He’d rambled about them enough, everyone was probably sick of it. 

The stars were the stars. They didn’t change too often. 

“Well, I’m not,” Kobra huffed. He wasn’t  _ fragile.  _ In fact, he was the one who broke Poison’s fucking nose, so who was the fragile one in the crew? “So go on. Lecture me.” 

While he hated to make Jet look so tired, even in the dark, it was true. Jet  _ always  _ lectured him after he and Poison fought - whether verbally or physically - and it didn’t work. It was just another go around. “‘M not gonna lecture you. You clearly hate it when I do that. So how about we do somethin’ else, yeah? Stargaze?”

“The stars are the stars.” And, not to mention, Kobra  _ hated  _ it when Jet accidentally made him mirror earlier thoughts. “So no.”

“Fine, then.” Jet lays back, though, far enough away to where he and Kobra weren’t touching. Kobra was more than okay with it - or at least, that’s what he told himself. “I’m gonna ask a question. And you’re gonna answer honestly, or you’re gonna skip.”

_ Skip  _ didn’t feel like he was going to get to not answer something. But whatever. He didn’t have much to lose, especially until the sun came up. Well, maybe he did, but the only one with that  _ executive power  _ was Poison, and Kobra didn’t give a shit about what he thought. “Shoot.” 

Maybe Jet sounded concerned about Kobra’s lack of reaction, but he was winding down from an argument, what could he say? Besides, his knuckles ached and he didn’t want to move them. “So… I guess you don’ wanna talk about Poison -”

“You’d be correct.”

“- But we’ll talk about you, then. Why do you sleep with people when you’re upset?”

“Skip.”

“That’s - that’s not a -” Jet didn’t say  _ what  _ he could skip or  _ how  _ many questions he could skip; Kobra’s quirk of a smile said he noticed that. “Fine, then, I guess. Why is that, when you’re upset, you can’t keep it in your fuckin’ pants to save a life?” 

“That’s the same question!”

“No it isn’t.” Jet was the one with the cheeky grin; Kobra could make out his dimples in the moonlight - Jet had a naturally dorky grin, one of the ones that you couldn’t help but smile back to. Not even Kobra was immune to that. “It’s a different question, ‘n you can’t double-skip!”

Kobra stuck his tongue out, though toward the sky and not Jet. The sentiment was there! “You never said that!”

“I just did!”

“Fine, fine, gimme a second to think, then!” 

Thinking is not Kobra’s strong suit. Actually, that was a lie, but he didn’t like thinking more often than he had to. Why  _ did  _ he sleep around when he got upset? It wasn’t a bad thing to like sex, he knew that it was just… yeah, he did have some shitty timing, didn’t he? 

Was it because of… shit. Great! Great, another fucking thing he couldn’t shake! “‘Cos of the - I guess - ‘cos how else am I gonna relieve stress?” 

“...By fixing what’s stressing you out?” 

“According to popular demand, I think the fall of BLI is my brother’s job, right?” 

Jet frowned, flicking Kobra on the head and not reacting as Kobra swatted him away. “C’mon, I said answer honestly. You can’t just  _ joke  _ ‘cos that’s not honesty!”

“Objectively, isn’t it true?” 

_ “Objectively, isn’t it true?”  _ Jet mocked, in the most nasally, high-pitched voice he could manage, shaking his head. “Why do you do that to relieve stress?”

“Because that’s what I’ve always done!” Kobra didn’t mean to snap - didn’t mean to swallow at the way Jet flinched back, didn’t mean to clench his aching hand the way he did. 

He didn’t mean to do a lot of things, he found. Most of them hurt someone, if not more than one person. Wasn’t that just fucking peachy? 

Jet bounces back, though, pretending it never happened. Wasn’t that what they always did? Kobra did something violent, and everyone pretended it never happened, and Kobra couldn’t shake the feeling that they hated him for being the way he was? “I mean, I ain’t, uh, from the city, but… I feel like that is  _ not  _ how tweens deal with stress.” 

“Hey, I was  _ fourteen,  _ thank you very much, and why not? It was my day’s off and Poison was never exactly fond of me being around the house at the same time as him.”

So. There was a lot to unpack there, Kobra knew that, but to him, it all made perfect sense. Back when they were in the City, Poison hated him for being Better than him, for being the higher ranking of the two, for being the reason mom got replaced and why Poison never had the time to do anything for himself. 

Yeah, there was a lot in those thoughts that Kobra wanted to put back in the jar he found them in. 

“Fourteen-year-olds don’t work jobs?” 

“Most didn’t.” Yeah, Kobra used to be special. He used to be the smart one, the one that knew more than everyone else, that knew how to fight and used to be able to hold it over someone’s head and if they didn’t like it, get them Bleached. 

It was a sick kind of authority that wasn’t meant to be given to a damn near child, but Kobra almost craved the feeling he got from it. He hated that. He hated who he used to be.

Then again, there was way more than that he hated about himself now, at seventeen rather than fourteen and three years of Desert sand marking the difference.

“Then… why did you?” Jet knew when and when not to pry, but sometimes, and Kobra knew this, he went against what he knew to pursue what he thought would be better in the long run.

Kobra didn’t care. Jet was Jet and… at least Jet didn’t call him an emotionally stunted Raven, that was something.

“‘Cos I was a S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W. Prodigy, actually, though sometimes I wonder if they jus’ told me that to keep my mouth shut.”

A Crow; sometimes Kobra forgot that himself, that he was basically told from the time he was eight to the time he hit the red line that  _ the people in color are bad and it’s best to shoot first and ask questions later.  _

It wasn’t  _ right  _ to do that to a child, but then again, as the child who was given the gun, Kobra hadn’t minded all that much at the time. It made him different, made him special, made him  _ better  _ than his brother and that was all he’d ever needed.

While Kobra looked up at the stars, looking for the brighter, almost orange star left of the satellite debris, his favorite, Jet took a moment to process. Not that Kobra could blame him, exactly, but he was tired of waiting for everyone to catch up on all the bad things he’d done when he didn’t know any better.

At what point did it become his own fault? At what point did he have to stop blaming his age or the company? 

Hell, did it even matter? He’d be dead in a year, tops. Was that even why it didn’t matter? Teenagers did dumb shit all the time, right? Usually, they didn’t make the best decisions, and he was a teenager, and he made horrible decisions every time he was confronted with two sets of options.

“That’s… uh… Explains a lot, I ‘pose…” Jet didn’t want to say whatever was on the tip of his tongue - Kobra could see it when he gave up trying to find his favorite star and glanced at Jet out of the corner of his eye. 

“Yeah? What does it explain?”

And, with the slightly passive-aggressive permission and, honestly,  _ dare,  _ Jet continues. “The temper, the oddly violent nature. How much you like fighting. And why you have such a thing against Crows personally.”

“Doesn’t  _ every  _ ‘joy have a reason to hate each Exterminator personally?”

“Do I  _ really  _ have to be the first one to tell you that you’re one of the most wild card fuckers in a fight with Exterminators? Even compared to  _ Ghoul  _ you’re a wild card, dude.” 

Kobra exhaled a breath, going back to looking at the stars. Where was that fucking orange star? “Yeah, yeah, I know. ‘M tryin’ to work on it. You guys don’t need to get hurt again.” 

“You’re, like, the little brother of the group, I don’t think that angsty ass logic applies here.” Little brother. Kobra was never going to escape that title, was he?

Then again, what did he expect when everyone called him  _ kid  _ so often he added it to the end of his name?

“Whatever, you get what I mean, dude. Okay? Are we done talking now?”

Jet rolled his eyes, turning onto his side to look at Kobra rather than the night sky. “Absolutely not. You know how this works.” 

“This  _ isn’t  _ how this usually works.” 

“Yeah, but you sound like a mess and it’s kinda my job as your friend to figure out how to help you get your shit together.” 

Kobra stuck his tongue out at Jet, unwilling and, he swore,  _ not  _ out of his own accord, turning onto his side to face Jet as well. “Suck my dick.”

“Now, that’s just rude,” Jet laughed, and Kobra noticed how his eyes crinkled around the corners. Kobra wondered how many people made him laugh - how often Kobra himself made Jet frown. “Seriously, though, you’re, like, an airplane full of baggage and it  _ definitely  _ needs to be sorted ‘fore you hurt yourself.” 

“Or my brother?”

“To be fair, he kinda had it comin’.” Jet...attempted to shrug, and because they were laying down and facing each other, it didn’t go too well, and it looked rather uncomfortable. “I jus’ feel bad for your date. Anyway, not everythin’ is about Poison.” 

“It wasn’t a  _ date. _ ” Kobra was  _ adamant  _ about that. He didn’t date. It wasn’t… something he knew very well. “ _ Everything  _ is about Poison. It doesn’t matter what I do, it’s about  _ him!” _

Jet smiled, beaming, actually, and Kobra was haplessly confused. That wasn’t something to smile about! “See, now you’re talkin’ about it! We can start unloading the baggage!”

“Oh, fuck off,” Kobra rolled his eyes, but he was smiling a fraction, too, and… maybe talking about how royally fucked over he was wouldn’t be too bad.

**Author's Note:**

> Not proofread at ALL! What'd u think? :p


End file.
